Portugal invented the Atlantic Ocean, the poet Fernando Pessoa once wrote—a bizarre claim that sounds a lot less bizarre once we start to ask ourselves how a small, broke, and backwater country in Europe ended up with a far-flung empire and vast system of trade. The power of European ocean travel conquered the world with amazing speed: The Spanish would range through the Americas, the Dutch would build a maritime empire begun mostly by financing trading ships, and, with the perfection of the square sail, the English would end up overseeing a quarter of the globe. But it all started with the Portuguese, creeping in their little caravels down the west coast of Africa. We forget how little explored the Earth’s oceans were before the 15th century and how rapidly they were mastered. In 1418, a Portuguese expedition funded by Prince Henry the Navigator was blown off course and discovered the Madeira Islands. A miracle, they called the shelter from the Atlantic storm they found there—600 miles southwest of Portugal but uncharted at the time. Only 104 years later, in 1522, European exploration was advanced enough for one of Ferdinand Magellan’s ships to complete a 40,000-mile, three-year circumnavigation of the globe. And in-between came such Portuguese sailors as Bartolomeu Dias, the first to round the southern tip of Africa, and Vasco da Gama, the first to reach India. Christopher Columbus—an Italian sailing for the Spanish crown—would inherit the lion’s share of history’s notice, but he was able to travel across the ocean to the Americas only after Portugal had established the idea that the Atlantic was something to be sailed.

Source: Portugal’s Moment | The Weekly Standard